Reviews, November 2015

Lion’s Blood —
Steven Barnes
Bilalistan, book 1

In
Steven Barnes’ 2002 novel Lion’s
Blood,
little Aiden O’Dere is rescued from a dismal life in a hidden Irish
village when bold Viking entrepreneurs provide Aiden and those
members of his village who survive the negotiation process (including
his mother and his sister, but not his father) with free
transportation to Bilalistan1, far across the ocean. There, the
kindly Muslims provide the Irish with room and board, in exchange for
such duties as their new masters deem appropriate.

Aiden
proves inexplicably ungrateful, even though his new owner, the Wakil
Abu Ali, is notoriously easy-going towards his property. Perhaps it’s
the hard work, the beatings, the short lives many slaves face, the
way slave women are used as sexual playthings, or simple white
intransigence, but something about his new life does not sit entirely
well with Aiden. There does not seem to be much that he can do about
his situation.

The Ballad of Beta-2 and Empire Star —
Samuel R. Delany

The
Ballad of Beta-2 and
Empire
Star
is a 1976 omnibus of Samuel R. Delany’s 1965 novel The
Ballad of Beta-2
and
his 1966 novel
Empire
Star
.
It’s not quite my first pick for a Delany review for my
Because
My Tears are Delicious to You
series (more on that later), but it is as close as I can come with my
current library.

These
are both very early Delany novels. Expectations based on later works
like
Dhalgren,
Triton, or
Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
may
well be misleading.

These
two books are also very, very short. Almost novellas. Brevity does not mean simplicity.

Night’s Master —
Tanith Lee
Tales of the Flat Earth, book 1

1978’s
Night’s Master,
by Tanith Lee, is volume one of the Tales
of the Flat Earth.
Set in the days when “the Earth was flat and floated on the ocean
of chaos,” this is less a novel than a collection of three two-part
novellas connected by a recurring character, the eponymous Night’s
Master, the great and powerful demon prince Azhrarn.

Arctic Rising —
Tobias Buckell

Tobias
Buckell’s 2012 novel Arctic
Rising takes
us to a global-warming future in which the arctic is increasingly
clear of unsightly ice … as well as the animals that used to live
there. Open seas mean access to all the resources of the north; ports
are springing up all around the Arctic Ocean. Prosperity abounds in
Canada and other, less important, nations!

But
someone always has to be a spoilsport. Possibly because Canada’s
benefit is the bane of most of the rest of the world, which must cope
with rising sea levels and increasingly savage storms.

Range of Ghosts —
Elizabeth Bear
The Eternal Sky, book 1

2012’s
Range
of Ghosts
is
the first novel in Elizabeth Bear’s
Eternal
Sky
series, which currently includes three linked novels and five shorter
works. Or so I see on consulting the ISFBD, because if the hardcover
I read has any hint that this is part of a series, I overlooked it. I
will return to this point later.

Life
as a relative of the Great Khan isn’t all beer and skittles and
sacking the defenseless cities of the great plains. Sometimes it
involves massive civil wars. The death of a Khan usually triggers a
squabble over the Khanate. Which of the rivals, Qulan or Qori Buqa,
will gain power? Or will the war end with the Khaganate in ruins?
Choosing which faction to join is a matter of life and death and
neutrality is not an option.

Temur
chose poorly, which is why when we meet him he is the lone survivor
of a slain army. He has been left for dead amidst the heaped bodies
of his close relatives.

Children of Time —
Adrian Tchaikovsky

Anyone
who has read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-part
Shadows
of the Apt
series, with its insect-themed kinden (clans) might well think that
Tchaikovsky is fond of bugs. Unlike so many of the rest of us.
Remember the neighbourhood kids warning you about earwigs? Those
horrifying creepy crawlies that might even now be laying their eggs
in your ear while you are distracted reading this text?

You
don’t know the half of it. But you will, once you read 2015’s
Children of Time.

Centuries
from now, the never-modest Doctor Kern thinks of the nameless world
twenty light-years from Earth as “Kern’s World”; she may not have
terraformed the world, but she certainly plans to populate it with a
species of her creation; monkeys infected with a nanovirus designed
to push the primates towards intelligence.

Everything
goes exactly to plan … except that there’s a catastrophic,
civilization-levelling war back on Earth. All the monkeys are killed
before they can reach Kern’s World. However, the
nanovirus
reaches the surface. There, it finds alternate hosts on whom to
inflict the Exaltation of Beasts.

Stand on Zanzibar —
John Brunner

1968’s
Stand
on Zanzibar
is the first of a thematically connected series of dystopian novels,
each wrestling with a different significant issue of the day (the day
being the 1960s and 1970s). It is arguably John Brunner’s finest work.

Brunner
takes us to a 2010 where Earth is home to so many people—seven
billion!—that if we all stood shoulder to shoulder in one location,
we would cover the island of Zanzibar. There’s no sign of a
Malthusian collapse on the horizon, but the unthinkable overcrowding
has had consequences, ranging from draconian eugenic laws to
outbreaks of violence. Conventional sexual mores have broken down and
society has become saturated with frivolous, pandering, Murdochian
mass media.

Two
roommates, Donald Hogan and Norman House, are drawn into seemingly
unrelated events on the opposite sides of the Earth.

Planetes —
Makoto Yakimura, Gorō Taniguchi, Ichirō Ōkouchi

I
love quasi-plausible SF set in our solar system, especially SF that
tries to be at least semi-plausible. For a long time, Anglospheric SF
had little interest in that particular literary niche. I was forced
to look abroad. Which eventually resulted in my exposure to the
2003–2004 26-episode anime series
Planetes,
adapted by Sunrise from Makoto Yakimura’s manga of the same name.

Ah,
the bright and shiny world of the 2070s! Space travel is, if not
routine, at least common; oil has been replaced by lunar helium three
1, thus ensuring the continuation of energy-intensive civilization.
Prosperity abounds!

For
the people working for Technora’s
Half
Section
,
prosperity is unevenly distributed. Space is just where they happen
to work. The Half Section, more correctly called the Space Debris
Section, are the garbagemen (and women) of SPAAACE!

Drinking Sapphire Wine —
Tanith Lee
Biting the Sun, book 2

Dragged
back to utopian four-BEE following the death of her pet and her
unborn child, the nameless narrator chafes against a society which,
they now realize, is much too limited. Life in four-BEE is pleasant
and utterly meaningless; the narrator and other adolescents, the
Jangs,
are expected to do nothing but enjoy themselves … but even the
adults (known only as
older
persons
)
play no really useful roles. Any job worth doing is done by robots
and quasi-robots because they can be trusted to do important jobs correctly.

Even
rebellion is meaningless in four-BEE. The quasi-robots who keep the
city running simply fix any damage with a long suffering sigh. Or so
everyone thought. And then … one of the Jangs, Zirk, outraged over
a comparatively trivial disagreement, challenges the narrator to a
duel. The duel leads to an interesting discovery. There
is
a crime the quasi-robot-run Committee will not forgive:

Persona —
Genevieve Valentine

2015’s
Persona
is Genevieve Valentine’s third novel.

Suyana
Sapaki is one of the International Assembly’s Faces, youthful
delegates whose demanding jobs offer very little in the way of power
or job security. Even popular Faces can fall from grace overnight and
Suyana is nothing like popular; not only is she herself less than
personable, but the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation itself
is something of an international pariah.

Summoned
to meet with the American Face and his handlers to negotiate the
terms under which the two Faces will feign a relationship—an
arrangement that Suyana regards as indistinguishable from
state-sanctioned prostitution—she gets a hint that someone believes
her utility has dropped below zero. That hint comes in the form of
several bullet wounds, none fatal.

The Accidental Terrorist —
William Shunn

I’ve
read a lot of SF, but there’s a heck of a lot of it. More than I
could read in my lifetime. That’s why this is the first book by
William Shunn I’ve ever read, even though he has been publishing
for decades and has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula1.
But … this book is not SF; it is autobiography.

Shunn
has done a lot of interesting things. He was part of the team that
wrote the venerable word-processing program, Wordperfect, which many
of us still feel was better than the Word that replaced it as the
business standard. He was also something of a celebrity in Canada in
the mid-1980s.

William
Shunn was the earnest young Mormon missionary whose bomb threat to
Flight 789 made newspaper headlines all across Canada.

The House of Shattered Wings —
Aliette de Bodard
Dominion of the Fallen, book 1

2015’s
The
House of Shattered Wings
is the first novel in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion
of the Fallen
setting1. Dominion
of the Fallen
features a world much like our own, so much like ours as to have its
own Paris, City of Lights. This secondary world has been a refuge for
Fallen angels for at least the last eight hundred years. Powerful and
avaricious, the Fallen easily dominate the humans around them. They
have transformed France into a paramount power ruled over by the
angel-led Great Houses of Paris.

In
1914, the Great Houses turned on each other, transforming Paris from
one of the world’s wonders into one of its great horrors. At the time
in which this novel is set, the Great Houses War is long over, but
Paris remains a post-apocalyptic desolation. Some Houses still stand,
but they are much reduced from their glory days.

Thus
far, House Silverspires has been one of the lucky ones. It survived
the War. It survived the loss of its founder, Morningstar. It
survived the unending jockeying for position between the surviving
Houses. Whether House Silverspires can survive what is to come is
entirely unclear.

An Inheritance of Ashes —
Leah Bobet

Leah
Bobet’s 2015 An
Inheritance of Ashes is
her second novel. The first was 2012’s1Above.

The
war against the Wicked God is over; the dread lord and its army of
Twisted Things were defeated by a single knife thrust from John
Balsam’s blade. How exactly Balsam killed a god by stabbing it is
unclear. Balsam vanished in the chaos that followed the Wicked God’s
death and no one else knows what happened.

Indeed,
all too few of the men who marched south from the lakelands to fight
the Wicked God have returned. Young Hallie and pregnant Marthe wait
for Marthe’s husband Thom to return, while doing their best to keep
Roadstead Farm functioning. Shell-shocked veterans trickle north, but
none of them are Thom. One wandering veteran, Heron, stays, trading
his labour for room and board over the winter. Still, even with his
help, the sisters may not be able to keep the farm … for reasons to
be explained later.

But
the appearance of a Twisted Thing at a window hints that the war
might not be as over as people think.

The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two —
Isaac Asimov

This
week’s
Because
My Tears are Delicious to You
review will cover 1972’s The
Hugo Winners, Volume One and Two
.
For one trivial reason (the book is shelved just at eye height in my
path from office to front door) and one literary reason (award
winning fiction has been on my mind of late). Just how good—or
bad—were the older Hugo winners?

This
volume combined two earlier collections, 1961’s
The
Hugo Winners
(later re-titled The
Hugo Winners, Volume One
)
and 1971’s
The
Hugo Winners, Volume Two
.
The whole volume thus includes the Hugo winning novellas and short
stories of the 1950s and 1960s
.

Incidentally,
my copy is the Science Fiction Book Club edition. Older fen will
remember that edition from the insert ads that used to grace SF
paperbacks
1. What wonders that insert promised! And what
structural damage it inflicted on the book binding!

In
addition to enjoying many of the stories, I found the book a
fascinating testament to the evolution of science fiction, 1950–1970.

Robot Universe: Legendary Automatons and Androids from the Ancient World to the Distant Future —
Ana Matronic

Ana Matronic
really really really likes robots. Perhaps her name should have been
something of a clue.

She
is perhaps best known as the female lead singer of the Scissor Sisters.
Matronic is also the author of 2015’s Robot
Universe: Legendary Automatons and Androids from the Ancient World to
the Distant Future. Which
is (I am sure this will astound you) a book about robots.

This
225 page hardcover is a coffee table book, a glossy paged, heavily
illustrated guide to the hundred most epic robots and automatons of
fiction and history.

Volkhavaar —
Tanith Lee

1977’s
Volkhavaar
is probably counted as one of Tanith Lee’s minor works, but I suspect
it’s one that a lot readers found endearing back in the Disco Era.

Life
for Shaina the slave girl, kidnapped when she was very young, is a
series of humiliations and beatings at the hands of her owners. Two
events will change her dismal lot forever: a seemingly chance meeting
with Barbayat, the Grey Lady from Cold Crag, and the appearance of
Kernik, the Clever Showman and his troupe, in particular the
exceedingly handsome Dasyel. Smitten with Dasyel, the young slave
agrees to Barbayat’s terms: she will allow the ancient witch to feed
on her blood in exchange for wisdom. Wisdom and power that can unite
Shaina and Dasyel.

What
Shaina does not know is that Kernik the Showman is merely the latest
name of the grand villain Volkhavaar, servant of a dark and forgotten
god. Dasyel, like all the players, is Volkhavaar’s thrall. What
Volkhavaar has he does not willingly surrender.

Lightless —
C.A. Higgins

I
picked up C. A. Higgins’ 2015 debut novel,
Lightless,
because 1) it got a glowing review from io9’s Andrew Liptak and 2) it
got a starred review from Kirkus. Having read it, I am left wondering
what Liptak and Kirkus saw in this book that I did not.

In
the grim boot-stamping-on-a-human-face-forever world of tomorrow, the
Solar System is ruled over by the merciless System, an authoritarian
regime slightly less lovable than the Qin Dynasty
Legalists.
Deviation, rebelliousness, and criminality are ruthlessly punished.
The entire Solar System is one big
panopticon state.

Or
that’s the theory. In practice, recording everything everyone does
not mean that the System has the means to sift through all the
information they are collecting. Dependence on computer surveillance
systems means that those systems are vulnerable to people who know
how to manipulate them. The System has abundant blind spots; both
criminals and terrorists thrive.

Including
people like Leontios Ivanov and Matthew Gale, the two space pirates
who have just covertly boarded the experimental space craft Anake.

The Garden —
Jasper MacDonald King

Canadian
author Jasper MacDonald King was, in his day, a bestselling author of
children’s fantasy. In recent years, certain “politically correct”
critics have chosen to ignore his delightful fiction and focus on
aspects of his life that were admittedly regrettable—the letter to
his distant cousin the Prime Minister urging that theSt Louisbe turned away,
his participation in the Orange Order’s annual “flogging Catholics
through the streets” celebration (the use of an actual Catholic was
discontinued in 1978, I might point out) and his status as the last
person to be hanged in Canada (following the discoveries in his
garden and a sensational 1952 trial )—but surely these are mere
distractions from the undeniable truth that he wrote some jolly good
books. Whatever his life and opinions may have been, surely his
fiction can be enjoyed for what it is.

The Buried Giant —
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ah,
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel
The
Buried Giant:
true literature or merely fantasy? The author seems worried that readers might be misled by the setting (medieval kingdom,
bandits, ogres, dragons, and magic) and mistakenly believe that this
is a
fantasy novel. Such are the travails of a literary author.

Post-Roman
Britain: the Empire has receded and a seemingly endless wave of
Saxons has poured in, pushing the Britons back across the island.
These tumultuous events hold little relevance for elderly couple Axl
and Beatrice, who are a lot more concerned by the fact that their
community no longer trusts them with candles, lest the pair burn
their home down.

Vexed,
Axl and Beatrice set out to find their son, who they are pretty sure
lives in a village near by, on the other side of a mist-filled
landscape populated by bandits, ogres, and oh yes, the dragon.

The Haunting of Hill House —
Shirley Jackson

I
don’t know what’s more embarrassing: that it took me until 2015 to
read Shirley Jackson’s 1959 classic
The
Haunting of Hill House
or that it took me until 2015 for me to read my first Shirley Jackson
story
1. Or that I actually saw the movie adaptation of this novel
before I read the book. At least it was the 1963 movie—the good
one—and not the trainwreck from a few years ago.

No
live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some,
to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills,
holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might
stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met
neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay
steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever
walked there, walked alone.

Daughter
of a white psychopomp and a Chinese apothecary, Elouise “Lou”
Merriweather has taken up her father’s calling, sending the restless
dead to the next world. It’s a dangerous calling, but as a person of
mixed race (not to mention a woman who prefers men’s clothing) in the
exuberantly bigoted world that is 19
th
century America, it’s not as if Lou has a lot of career options open
to her.

Now
Lou is adding a new occupation to her career portfolio: consulting
detective. Chinatown’s young men have been heading into the interior
of Colorado, enticed by a dubious job offer. None have returned. The
authorities could not care less what happens to Chinese-Americans, so
it falls to Lou to accept a commission from her estranged mother and
investigate the case of the disappearing men.

Hope —
John Woloschuk, Dee Long, Terry Draper

I
have no idea how I stumbled across progressive rock band Klaatu—nor
did I have any idea that aforesaid stumbling
might
have been the result of the grim jackboot of socialism stamping on
the ears of Canadian radio listeners!

Although
certain wild-eyed fans speculated that the band was actually the
Beatles, returned under a new name, in fact they were a trio of
Canadians: John Woloschuk, Dee Long, and Terry Draper.

Unsurprisingly,
given that their band name comes from the name of Michael Rennie’s
alien ambassador in the film
The
Day the Earth Stood Still
(which in turn was based on Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to
the Master”), science fiction themes are prominently featured in their oeuvre
.
Take,
for example, their
Juno-Award-winningconcept album Hope.

Earthrise —
M. C. A. Hogarth
Her Instruments, book 1

2013’s
Earthrise
is the first novel in the Her
Instruments
series, by the prolificM.C.A. Hogarth. It’s also the first Hogarth novel
I have ever read. I picked it up for two reasons: it was free and I
had heard others talk about it in a way that made me think the book
might scratch my
Traveller
itch. Traveller,
the old-time Dumarest meets the
Solar
Queen
rpg that featured rag-tag crews making a slender living moving goods
from system to system in beat-up starships.

As
it turned out, there are indeed some
Traveller-like
elements in the book, but I was even more strongly reminded of an
entirely different, considerably less well-known rpg. More on that later.

Reese
Edding and the rest of her rag-tag crew—twins Sasha and Irvine,
Bryer, Kis’eh’t, and Allacazam—
do
make a slender living moving good from system to system in the
beat-up starship
TMS
Earthrise. The ship had a brush with insolvency before but was saved by a large gift from a
mysterious benefactor. Well, not to much gift as a payment for a
service to be named later.

The Storm Lord —
Tanith Lee
Wars of Vis, book 1

1976’s
The
Storm Lord
is the first volume in Tanith Lee’s The
Wars of Vis
trilogy. It establishes the setting: oppressed Lowlanders who face
endless racial persecution at the hands of the violent and sexually
voracious Vis majority.

Dragged
away from her people to sate King Rehdon’s lusts, priestess Ashne’e
leaves her mark on history in two ways; first, her deadly Lowland sex
magic leaves Rhedon a corpse the first time he rapes her. Second,
that single night is enough to leave Ashne’e pregnant with Rhedon’s
youngest son, a boy who by the laws of the great city of Dorthar is
entitled to its throne!

If
he can stay alive long enough to claim his rightful place.

Warning:
by the standards of the 1970s, which were kind of rapey, this is
super-duper rapey.

The Silkworm —
Robert Galbraith
Cormoran Strike, book 2

2014’s
The
Silkworm
,
the second mystery in Robert Galbraith’s
Cormoran
Strike
series, proved to me that sometimes having a legendarily lousy memory
can be an asset. Ditto for not looking at author bios immediately.

Catapulted
from poverty to fame and fortune by the events of the first book,
The
Cuckoo’s Calling
,
Strike discovers that well-to-do clients can often be entitled prats.
Annoyed with his latest jerk client, Strike fires the man to take a
considerably less remunerative case: locating errant author Owen
Quine for Quine’s wife, Leonora Quinn

The
question very quickly evolves from “where has Owen got off to this
time?” to “Why would anyone want Owen back?” Owen appears to be
a collection of character flaws wrapped around more character flaws.
A man-child utterly focused on his own needs and desires, an author
of little talent and enormous spite, Owen revels in being offensive
and grating. He’s certainly not faithful to his wife. To know Owen is
to hate him.

When
Owen turns up in a derelict building, disemboweled and very, very
dead, the problem is not, therefore, working out who wanted him dead,
but narrowing the vast crowd of suspects down to only one.

vN —
Madeline Ashby
Machine Dynasty, book 1

I
missed Madeline Ashby’s 2012 debut novel, vN,
when it was first released. Back then, other people picked what I
read and I didn’t have enough slack in my schedule to fit in books
just because I wanted to read them. Now I that I have the luxury of
time again, I intend to use it.

Amy
Peterson is a perfect little girl, even better than the organic
variety. Raised by her doting organic father and his artificial wife,
Amy’s physical parameters are constrained by diet. As for her
software—von Neumann robots like Amy are programmed
to comply with human demands. She will even auto-destruct if a human
suffers harm in her vicinity.

Seveneves —
Neal Stephenson

My
former editor Andrew Wheeler used to delight in sending me books he
knew would cause me great pain. He would have, I suspect, been
smiling very cheerfully had he had the opportunity to send me Neal
Stephenson’s sprawling
Seveneves,
because
it combines Stephenson’s traditional weaknesses—intrusive
infodumps, shaky plotting, resolutions that feel less like endings
than the moment the author got bored typing—with a host of new
ones, like an almost Jack McDevittesque grasp of deep time.

One
day, the Moon explodes into seven large fragments and a host of tiny
ones. Maybe it was aliens. Maybe it was a passing primordial black
hole. Maybe it was an author who couldn’t be bothered to come up with
a plausible scenario. The important thing is that scientists soon
realized that a process analogous to
Kessler Syndrome would turn a handful of large fragments into a vast cloud of smaller
pieces. Enough of these fragments would impact the Earth to scour the
planet clean of all life.

The
good news is that this will not happen immediately (or this would
have been a very short novel instead of the behemoth that it is). The
bad news is that it will happen all too soon, in two years or so.
Everyone on Earth is doomed.

The Palace of Eternity —
Bob Shaw

Bob
Shaw’s 1969 novel
The Palace
of Eternity
is almost a mirror image of this week’s Tanith Lee:
it starts off looking like the hardest of hard SF, then heads off
into territory more often associated with fantasy.

Sickened
by his experiences in the great war between humanity and the alien
Pythsyccans, retired soldier Mack Travener settles on the planet
Mnemosyne. Conventional interstellar craft cannot approach the
planet, which is surrounded by a shell of fragments left by two
shattered moons. Mnemosyne seems doomed to remain an eternal
backwater. Inexplicably, despite its rustic nature, the planet is a
hotbed of creativity, particularly artistic creativity.

Mack’s
attempt to reinvent himself as a civilian mechanic on a planet of
peaceful artists is short-lived.